


Laundry

by atria



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:27:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28981836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: James, intimacy, and the travails of doing laundry in a small, gossipy town that you police. Lewis helps.
Relationships: James Hathaway & Robert Lewis, James Hathaway/Robert Lewis
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	Laundry

The trouble with living in a town that belonged to the very old and very young was that no entrepreneur in their right mind ever opened a new laundry. There were dry cleaners for a bargain, windows lined with the plush and froth of the dynastic wealthy and the aspirants. At Oxford you needed a gown more than you needed a raincoat. But those who belonged did their everyday washing in college; briefs, bras, incontinence knickers, your intimates were under care of the institution. 

James had lived that way too. But then he turned in his room keys and packed up the suits he’d worn to interviews and drink parties, forwent the city job for a copper’s salary. And on his first week in his first matchbox-size studio he discovered the problem of undershirts. 

Janice from accounts took pity on him and pointed him to a coin laundry at a well-hidden corner of the mega Waitrose. Or, she said, if he was bashful about mingling his delicates with housewives and cloth diapers, there was a grubby but serviceable shop run by the same couple who catered half the nick’s overtime Indian, and sometimes you could make friends with a porter and smuggle yourself in on a university holiday. 

But the places filled up quickly. Two years into the job and he couldn’t go to Naan Palace without seeing the boy artist who’d drawn a picture of him and whom they’d almost put away for murder in return, Waitrose without feeling George Stoker’s gaze on his back in reverse of the way he’d watched Stoker once, reading his absolution in a blind old man’s bedroom. In that moment all James had worried about was the knife. 

Sometimes, in his dreams, James still heard Stoker, speaking to the dying professor with the blade to steady his hand. Sometimes it was James he was speaking to, and his forgiveness bled onto James’ palm. 

Forgiveness hadn’t saved Stoker and justice hadn’t healed any one of the witnesses, dependants, next-of-kin whose lives they’d perturbed in its name. He couldn’t even think about the dead. Sometimes the job was fun and sometimes he was the law’s bony and avaricious finger, tapping on windows to homes he’d never been on the inside of. 

He put the question to Lewis once, casually, as he’d taken to doing with any true problems of conscience, the ones that made everyday living difficult. 

“How do you do it, sir? Your shopping, going for a pint. When you run into people you’ve known. There must be so many of them.” 

So many who remembered him in all his states— young and brash and perfectly happy to scurry after Morse, weekend at Tesco wife and plump children in tow— even those that had ceased to be true. James too had changed recklessly and often, it was true, but he had no experience of living it out in one place.

“Well, I call uniform, if they’re meant to be inside.”

“Sir.”

“You know, my wife used to call me ‘Robert’ in that tone of voice. Just as well you never met.” James glanced at him, but the dip of his mouth was matter-of-fact. They were sat on the bench with pints at evening, talking lightly, very lightly, as the sun moved in the trees. “What’s brought this on?”

“The odd run-in, here and there. I suppose I feel responsible. As well I should.” Moral imperatives, duty of care, jurisprudence. (What Lewis called ‘a word like a fart’.)

“They’ve left their mark on you, too, you know. You’ll never be rid of this place, and it won’t be rid of you.” Lewis wiped his chin and looked straight at James, earnest, if a bit wry. It was an expression he must have lifted from James himself. “It’s called living in the world, Jim.”

“Besides, it hasn’t been all bad for you, has it?” That look on his face now. Such a smile.

“No. No, it hasn’t.”


End file.
